1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a family of star puzzles of the cubic class introduced in U.S. Pat. No. 4,586,713 and in the parent patent application Ser. No. 394,869 filing date July 2, 1982 now U.S. Pat. No. 4,593,907.
Each puzzle is comprised of various pieces which rotate in groups relative to each other in such a way as to alter the surface configurations. The object and the challenge is to perform twists and turns aimed at restoring the surfaces to their original configuration or to other interesting configurations.
2. Relation to the Prior Art This invention generalizes the star prism puzzles introduced in U.S. Pat. No. 4,586,713 and in the parent patent application cited above . internal core part and exactly 3N+2 component structures (N=3, 4, 5, 6, etc.) stacked around it in three layers to form overall shapes of right prisms having bases (prism parallel faces) in the form of stars. A standard star puzzle is used here to denote puzzles of the prior art and is referred to as an N-pronged star, N-point star or N-star if it has an overall shape of a right prism and if its bases are polygons in the form of a star with N prongs (N pointed projecting parts). A generalized star puzzle according to the present invention is a puzzle having three layers of component structures and having N prongs or N pointed projecting parts; each prong is comprised of 3L component structures where L=1, 2, . . . , L may be different for different prongs and must be larger than one for at least one prong. Thus, since the number of component structures in each of the N prongs of a generalized star puzzle according to the present invention must be a multiple of 3, with such a multiple being greater or equal to one (greater than one for at least one prong), it follows that the N prongs must together have 3M component structures where M is a number larger than N. The external visible faces of these generalized star puzzles may, but need not be plane faces. The present invention introduces a variety of shapes, a wide range of challenges, and ease of assembly.